Point Zero: Redefining Otaku

Here is something which I discovered accidentally when some itchy hands decides to purposefully failing the patten lock on my HTC Dream causing me to be locked out from it.

For androids owner, I am sure many of you are impressed with the patten screen lock function of your phone and most of your out there would have it enabled to impress your friends. So I am sure this scenario will bound to happen( because I did it to my friend’s magic):

- You show your friend the patten lock

- Your friend takes your phone to play with it

- They enabled the screen locks

- They try to crack your patten, continuing pass the first multiply tries lock and finally you are required to enter your Google account email and      password to unlock

next these three things can happen:

- You enter your password and successfully unlocks your phone

-You forgot your password

- You swear you remembered your password but despite many tries you where told that your username or password is wrong

Now if the first thing happened to you, most likely you would not be here. For the rest, most likely you have tried to reset your passwords but you stills failed the lock in.

Here is a very simple way to solve the problem:

1) You would need to bypass the lock out.

-For Dream users you do this by flipping your screen up and down and hitting the home key( the button with a house printed on it) while the screen changes orientations.  Eventually you’ll drop through to your home screen.  This may take a few tries.

-For other users you would need to toggle the same orientation changes. I believe you can do this by rotating your phone physically. Please tell me if anyone succeeded bypassing on the other phones

2) Go to your security settings and disable the unlock pattern. For dream users you can now bypass the lockout just by opening the keyboard, for others again I would need your help to confirm if you are able bypass by re-orientating your phone.

3) Change the password of your Google account and have your phone sync up to your account.

4) Your phone should failed to sync up and prompt you to enter your password. Enter your new password.

5) Try to sync up your phone again, once successful lock your screen and try unlocking it.  This should unlock your phone.

Here are the reasons which I believe caused the bug. According to a Google reply in one of its issue thread, currently the Google account checks works by doing a local hash comparison against the credentials  entered when you setup the first time. This is the main reason I believe that explains why resetting your passwords will not work. It also explains why the correct passwords are “wrong” for you might have changed your passwords after setting up your phone.

In the same reply Google claims that the issue will be rectify in the future release by the following changes:

"- clicking "forgot pattern" is no longer sticky; you can go back to trying your pattern.  that should prevent folks to getting into
the "too many pattern attempts" state forever without actually entering the incorrect pattern 30 times
- the google account check now falls back on an online check against the current password (as opposed to the current local
hash comparison). that way, even if you have forgotten you password, you can reset it online and then enter the matching
password on your device.  this will also mitigate the case where the check against a stored hash of the "i swear it is correct"
password fails"

Well this is really a very stupid error in the program design which I think
should have been found out and solved even before the released of the OS.
Though I have to say I am thankful for the bug that allowed be to bypassed
the problem with ease.

Finally many thanks to the peeps over at issue thread #3006 and xkcd.com for
the ingenious yet wonderful fix ^.^